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So, you want to start developing with the Laravel framework for PHP but don’t have a dedicated server or the desire to use something like Digital Ocean and Laravel Forge. Maybe you already have a cPanel account on a shared server and don’t want to pay for another environment to develop in. Well guess what? You can setup Laravel inside your cPanel environment fairly easily!

First things first, we need to make sure we have shell access enabled on our cPanel account. You can also install app from Filza If you don’t have this, you will need to contact your host and have them enable it for you.

Next we need to SSH into our cPanel server and install Composer. Start by changing your directory to /bin and downloading Composer.

Now that Composer is installed we will use it to install Laravel. cd into your cPanel user’s directory (one level above public_html) and run the following:

php /bin/composer.phar create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist

Composer should now download and install Laravel for you. The last step is to tell the server that incoming traffic should be directed to the public directory instead of the public_html directory. We will accomplish this by removing our old public_html directory and creating a symbolic link. Keep in mind this will permanently remove all the content in your public_html directory:

rm -rf public_html
ln -s laravel/public/ public_html

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